Busy As The Proverbial Bee

I generally assume I'll be able to write on my lunch hour or something. This is a stupid assumption because as repetitive as my job is it's different every day. Every. Day. Today not in a great way but, hey, my life isn't so spontaneous and exciting that I can't just come home and write.

WRONG!

I just got home from a terrific dinner with the inimitable Tony Comstock who is actually writing under his given name now. So more correctly I had dinner with Captain David Ryan. Same amount of fun. Slightly different label. Just as I was leaving work he used The Power of Twitter to see what I was up to and a short time later we were sucking down sushi together.

He's been sailing a lot in the past year and a half so we talked a lot about sailing. We talked a lot about a lot. Just ask our waiter how hard it was to get a word in edgewise. Sailing figured prominently, though, whether on the open ocean or off the coast of Long Island, or round about the Caribbean. Just before we parted he was telling me a story and describing teaching a client to man the sailboat's tiller. The man was thrilled and The Captain's description was full of all that excitement. I could see them sharing the marvel of cutting through the water at high speed, bending the power of the wind to serve their aim.

I often fall into the trap of comparing myself to others to my own detriment. Other times I compare in the interest of learning what I like and where I want to go. It is, as they say, a fine line. Sometimes, though, it's just kind of hilarious.

I was leaning in to catch every nuance of The Captain's narrative. I could see the boat and the client and the shit eating grins. Then he mentioned the tiller and a picture popped immediately into my mind. It's of me, at about 7 years of age, manning the tiller of a canal boat while my dad instructs me. If you're unfamiliar with canal boats they're, you know, on canals which don't have current to speak of and they're kind of like tiny house boats. They are the Subaru Outbacks of the boating world. Useful, amusing enough, yet hardly sexy.

Which is all to say that dinner was great. It's always a hell of a treat to spend time with someone with whom you share so much in common...even if you are gliding along entirely different waterways.